


Skin Deep

by Sandrine Shaw (Sandrine)



Category: X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
Genre: F/M, Post-Movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-16
Updated: 2012-02-16
Packaged: 2017-10-31 06:49:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/341161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sandrine/pseuds/Sandrine%20Shaw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raven comes to appreciate that maybe who you are is more important than who you can be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Skin Deep

It takes her weeks until she finally accepts that the skin she's wearing now is her own.

Sometimes, she spends hours in front of the mirror. The face that stares back at her is becoming a little less foreign every day. She's getting used to being like this, getting used to being _human_ , and she despises herself a little for it. Not as much as she despises the others whose stares she continues to attract whenever she walks into a room: the same people who used to look at her with disgust and label her a freak, who now gaze at her with unconcealed desire. Her revenge is to ignore them, to smile a lazy smile and cross her legs until her skirt rides up, telling them in so many little gestures that they're not worthy. She has a whole new set of weapons at her disposal (different now, because the body she's wearing is not just decoy), and she learns to master them as thoroughly and quickly as she's mastered any other weapon before.

It's all just a game to her, until one night she walks into a bar and finds a familiar face.

She never really stopped to wonder what has happened to any of them. Of course, the incident at Alcatraz has been all over the news, as has Magneto's fate. She enjoyed the poetic justice of it for all of a second before his words came back to her ( _"You're not one of us anymore"_ ) and she realized that no matter how he was paying for his sins, it wouldn't compensate for her loss.

Beyond that, though, she didn't bother to find out what had happened to anyone else that day on the island. The only way for her to continue like this, trapped in this body, was to turn her back on the world she once knew – which is why her first impulse is to turn around and walk away when she sees him, sitting alone at the bar and nursing a beer. There are four stools vacant on either side as if the mere sight of him is enough to scare off any possible companions.

It is curiosity that makes her step closer, despite herself. She's always been curious when it came to him. She hasn't met many people she'd call interesting, and she has little to no respect for Charles Xavier's bunch of do-gooders, but Wolverine intrigues her. He's the only man to ever leave her with a scar, literally, and he's one of the few who turned her down. Maybe that's why she cannot just leave: because he's the one who got away. Or maybe it's the lure of something familiar that makes her approach, the knowledge that – even though they've fought on different sides, even though he's a mutant and she might as well be human now – he's like her: a survivor.

It's every film noir cliché come true: a gloomy bar, cigar smoke heavy in the air, a jazz tune playing in the background, and the femme fatale approaches the hard-boiled hero to manipulate him into whatever sinister plan she has on her mind. Except that she doesn't have any plans, neither sinister nor otherwise, as she slides onto the stool next to his.

He barely turns his head to acknowledge her presence. He takes another swing from the bottle and, staring straight ahead, tells her, "I'm not in the mood for company."

"You don't say," she replies, unperturbed, and orders herself a glass of wine.

They sit in silence for a while. He empties three or four bottles of beer, but seems no more intoxicated than he was when she arrived. She still sips her wine – she never really cared for alcohol, and she likes to stay alert and on top of her game, especially since she has no powers to fall back on.

There are words on the tip of her tongue – questions, invitations – but she holds them in check. It's obvious that, in order to coax him out of his self-induced solitude, she has to allow him to make the first move. One of the basic rules of manipulation: always have the opponent believe that what they're doing has been their own idea, never yours. Just because she's lost her powers doesn't mean she's forgotten the rules.

Eventually it works, as it always does.

"How come you're not scared away?" he grunts, after an hour of drinking in silence. "Everyone else was."

"I'm not everyone." Not the most original come-back, but the opening was too perfect to miss. The next one will be a direct hit though, she knows: "Besides, you're not all that scary."

Hook, line and sinker. He laughs around the neck of his bottle. "You have no idea, lady."

She turns around to face him, regarding him with cool disinterest that's completely fake. "Don't I? Well, all I see is a poor sod drowning his sorrows in beer. What happened? Did your woman break your heart? Somebody die? Nowhere else to go? Get in line. We all lost someone." The bitterness in her voice comes sudden and unbidden, and she only realizes that she's abandoned her ploy to speak her mind when the words are already out.

There's darkness in his gaze and anger buried beneath, and she knows he probably wants to let his claws slide free. But when he speaks, he's disappointingly calm and controlled. "Not the same."

She silently agrees. It's not the same. He might have lost a team member or two. But she, she lost herself.

"It's never the same. And still, life goes on," she argues, but it's just a phrase with no meaning.

She shouldn't have come here. Talking to him, facing another mutant – especially one she has a shared past with – awakens memories of who she was, and all the bitterness and anger and helplessness that she thought she was past come back to haunt her. Every fibre of her body aches to jump into a fight with him, but she knows that like this, she wouldn't stand a chance even if he didn't have any particular powers. This body is weak and fragile, and she hates it for that. At the same time, though, she feels his eyes on her, unveiled desire reflecting in them, and the cold, pragmatic side of her thinks that frail as this body might be, she could have done much worse.

Without even bothering to pay for her wine, she gets up and leaves. No goodbye, no backward glance.

She knows he will follow, and he does, eventually.

When he finds her leaning against his bike, he growls, "Sure of yourself, aren't you?"

"Shouldn't I be?" she replies coyly, but deep down inside she registers with surprise that she really _is_ sure of herself. The thought is followed by the sudden realization that the loss of her powers doesn't mean that she's powerless. It's like an epiphany; and it makes her feel a little more at home in her skin. A little more like _herself_ ; and when she kisses him, it feels almost as if it's Mystique kissing Wolverine: raw, primal, like fighting. As close to the real thing as it gets, these days.

"Don't hold back," she hisses. "I'm not going to break."

He laughs. "You just might." The suggestion infuriates her, and her fingernails leave bloody gashes on his back that heal before she has a chance to admire them. But even though the wounds vanish quickly, they serve their purpose to make his instincts come forth. His hands are rougher now, his hold of her more solid.

For a few, precious moments, she remembers what it is like to be his equal.

But the illusion is gone too fast, and all that's left are bruises on her pale skin and a strange, foreign kind of melancholy on his face that reminds her why he allowed this to happen in the first place.

"You wish I was someone else," she says with a small, sad smile.

His hand comes up to brush a strand of hair from her forehead. There's a surprising gentleness in his touch, which she tries to resent; but instead, she finds herself leaning into it.

"No," he says, finally, long after she's given up waiting for a response. "But you do."

It would be easy to misunderstand his words. But she's tired of playing games; and there is nothing to gain by pretending that he doesn't know who she is. "We all lost something, right?" she mutters, roughly.

His hand comes to rest on her shoulder. Reaching up, she lightly traces the lines between the knuckles where she knows the claws are hidden.

"We did. And still, life goes on," he says, echoing her earlier words. It sounds more convincing, coming from him.

When she leaves that night, it's with the awareness that maybe who you are is more important than who you can be. – It's a new concept, and she knows it will take a while to come to terms with it. But Logan was right after all. Life does, in fact, go on. It gets a little easier every day. A little more comfortable in her own skin. And eventually, she stops hating herself for it. After all, this is what she's always done: she adapts.

She doesn't bother tracking Logan down again. They gave each other what they needed that night. There's nothing left to give, or to gain, from further encounters.

A cool day in November, three and a half months later, finds Magneto at her doorstep. He doesn't look as old and frail and defeated as she imagined he'd be, but to her own surprise, she finds that she doesn't care. Whatever thirst for revenge she used to harbour towards him has faded into disregard.

He acts like he regrets abandoning her and speaks of moving chess pieces and the cure wearing off. "It's not permanent, Mystique. We'll soon be ourselves again."

She sighs and asks, "Have you ever considered that maybe whatever cure they gave you just wasn't enough to take your powers away completely in the first place?"

It gives her no satisfaction to see the flicker of hope in his eyes die. She considers telling him that they have always been themselves, powers or not, and always will be. But despite her lack of raging hatred, she can't rouse any kindness for the man who so casually dismissed her at the first sign of _otherness_ , just as the humans had done before.

She closes the door to his face and resists the urge to undress and check her skin for patches of blue. She knows she won't find any.


End file.
